Economic Encounters of the Plural Kind

David Simon on Capitalism and Inequality

I confess- I’ve only watched one episode of The Wire, and I found the muffled dialogue difficult to follow. Someday, I will come back to the series. Nonetheless, I’m familiar enough with David Simon that I know he has a lot of valuable analysis to offer on our economy. An interview of his with Bill Moyers is reprinted in Guernica. A key point of this interview is the validity and value-add of fiction as a lens and medium for social analysis:

One of the themes of The Wire really was that statistics will always lie. Statistics can be made to say anything. You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America…

There are about 749 different shows, dramas and comedies, on television right now. Seven hundred and forty-eight of them are about the America that I inhabit, that you inhabit, that most of the viewing public, I guess, inhabits. There was only one about the other America.

He has a lot to say about how our economy is structured, and those whom it leaves behind:

The people most affected by [the drug war] are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. Since we basically have become a market-based culture, that’s what we know, and it’s what’s led us to this sad denouement. I think we’re going to follow market-based logic right to the bitter end…

You start talking about a social compact between the people at the bottom of the pyramid and the people at the top, and people look at you and say, “Are you talking about sharing wealth?” Listen, capitalism is the only engine credible enough to generate mass wealth. I think it’s imperfect, but we’re stuck with it. And thank God we have that in the toolbox. But if you don’t manage it in some way that incorporates all of society, if everybody’s not benefiting on some level and you don’t have a sense of shared purpose, national purpose, then it’s just a pyramid scheme. Who’s standing on top of whose throat?

…a lot of the people who end up voting for that kind of laissez-faire market policy are people who get creamed by it…

We’re in an era when you don’t need as much mass labor; we are not a manufacturing base. People who built stuff, their lives had some meaning and value because the factories were open. You don’t need them anymore. Unions and working people are completely abandoned by this economic culture, and, you know, that’s heartbreaking to me…

And I actually think that’s the only time when change is possible, when people are actually threatened to the core, and enough people are threatened to the core that they just won’t take it anymore…

In Haymarket, they were fighting for the eight-hour workday. It sounded radical at the time, but it’s basically a dignity-of-life issue…as long as they placate enough people, as long as they throw enough scraps from the table that enough people get a little bit to eat, I just don’t see a change coming…

I couldn’t have conceived of something as grandiose as the mortgage bubble, when you finally look at what caused that, and the sheer greed and the stupidity of that pyramid scheme. We didn’t know it was as corrosive as it was. We didn’t know it was rotted out that much. But we knew there was something rotten in the core. And we knew it from what we were looking at, in terms of Baltimore, and how Baltimore addressed its problems.

Much of the misery caused by our economic system is borne out of sight, in areas where only the disenfranchised are. As Simon points out, we aren’t yet at the point where the economic situation seems like life and death and people are willing to consider alternatives to how we’ve structured our economy. How large does the permanent underclass need to become before a tipping point is reached?

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[…] I disagree with Bill Moyers: he sees David Simon as a modern-day Dickens whereas my preferred comparison is Balzac. No matter, his interview with Simon is well worth watching or reading in Guernica [ht: nk]. […]

Open Economics

This blog is administered by a group of students and alumni from the University of Notre Dame who are interested in engaging and debating the world of economic phenomena we face, everywhere and everyday.
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